A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Susan Fletcher’s Falcon in the Glass, which is fun, but not one of her best books.

Also two Adam Gopnik books. I am probably not the ideal reader for The Table Comes First. There is only so much I can read about the philosophical underpinnings of cooking and avant garde innovation in cuisine before my eyes start to glaze over. But I think it’s also partly that Gopnik’s writing style has become more aphoristic and more obsessed with mortality since he wrote Paris to the Moon, neither of which strike me as positive developments. He can turn anything into a meditation on mortality.

But I did like Gopnik’s children’s book, The King in the Window. I was so unimpressed by The Steps across the Water that I almost didn’t read this one, but I’m glad I did, because it’s much more solid. (Still not entirely solid. Gopnik clearly subscribes to the Alice in Wonderland school of fantasy worldbuilding, which I think only really worked in Alice and The Phantom Tollbooth.)

Oliver has become the king of the window wraiths, who are locked in an age-old struggle with their mortal enemies the...well, that would be telling: one of the pleasures of the book is learning with Oliver about the window wraiths and their world. But I mention the struggle with evil, because it leads to this great exchange between Oliver and Mrs. Pearson, the elderly lady who becomes one of his trusted lieutenants (and incidentally one of my favorite characters):

“I was thinking that since they picked me, then I must have, like, this sort of instinct inside me that would let me, uh, lead and all and that I shouldn’t really think too much. You know, trust my instincts. Get beyond my conscious mind, get in touch with the universe, go beyond, like, logic, and use the force…” Oliver trailed off weakly.

Mrs. Pearson’s eyes were like blue ice. Oliver could tell she was struggling to contain her emotions. “You...find...yourself in a confrontation with absolute evil, and you...are...planning...not...to...think?”

You have no idea how many children’s book heroes I have wanted to say this to!

What I’m Reading Now

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset. This book gives me the same feeling as Blood and Sand: if Sutcliff’s publishers would have let her get away with it, Artos and his bff Bedwyr would clearly have been boinking their way up and down the coast of Britain in between Saxon-slaying sessions.

What I Plan to Read Next

Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. How can I go wrong with a book that has a subtitle as long as my arm?

“The food in those places wasn’t so much ‘rich’ as deep, dense. Each plat arrived looking mellow and varnished, like an old violin. Each mouthful registered like a fat organ chord in a tall church, hitting you hard and then echoing down the room.”

Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is a memoir and a travelogue, a mixture of two of my favorite genres; and it is one of the first books that I remember enjoying not only for its narrative pull or its quickly yet memorably sketched characters (although those are quite fine), but for the sheer lushness of the prose. Gopnik’s book, like the French food he describes, resounds like an organ chord.

It’s a hard book to quote. One can’t just pick out punchy one liners; many of the lines are lovely, but they draw their loveliness from the symphony of lines working together to build to something greater than themselves. It’s beautiful writing, but an old fashioned sort of beauty; I think often we don’t let our writing breathe that way anymore.

Of a taxidermist who bemoans the fact that they are no longer allowed to stuff big game animals, even if they die in zoos: “The government is worried, as governments will be, I suppose, that if fallen elephants are turned into merchandise, however lovely, then sooner or later elephants will not just be falling. Elephants will be nudged.”

Elephants will be nudged. The line is so striking to me: the juxtaposition of the enormous elephant and the miniscule force implied in nudged.

Or speaking of the Musee d’Orsay, where the grand, cold Academic paintings of the nineteenth century hang in the main hall, while the Impressionists are relegated to out-of-the-way rooms:

“It is a calculated, venom-filled insult on the part of French official culture against French civilization, revenge on the part of the academy and administration on everyone who escaped them. French official culture, having the upper hand, simply banishes French civilization to the garret, sends it to its room. What one feels, in that awful place, is violent indignation - and then an ever-increased sense of wonder that Manet and Degas and Monet, faced with the same stupidities of those same academic provocations in their own lifetimes, responded not with rage but with precision and grace and contemplative exactitude.”

Possibly Gopnik is the only person to ever accuse the Impressionists of precision. But it suits, in a way: they have precision of attitude, precision of mood. In any case, grace and contemplative exactitude (and, perhaps, a little rage) are the hallmarks of art; and Gopnik's book overflows with both.